View From a Kite Page 8

  “Let me know what happens,” I tell them, and they promise they will phone me wherever I am and tell me all about it. OFN gives me a long hug that tells me to be brave, which makes me cry. I can hardly wait to get away after that. George drops me off at Mama’s hospital and goes to get the muffler on his truck fixed.

  “I’ll be back for you in an hour, Gwennie.”

  “I’ll be here,” I say. “Or in Majorca.”

  She’s in the sunroom, sitting at a card table with three other patients. There is Minnie, who is terminally nervous—she babbles and babbles about nothing. Jacob is a quiet man in a red quilted robe and—I swear—false eye-lashes. He plays his cards from left to right, regardless of suit or number, and never, ever says a word. They sort of even out, Minnie and Jacob. Minnie’s a killer player and Jacob’s terrible. Then there’s Ralphie, who bosses everyone and tells them what to play and when. He does all the shuffling so no one will stack the deck and he deals for Mama, who is always his partner, and Jacob, who isn’t. He’d like to deal for Minnie, but she won’t play if he does so he jitters and wiggles the table and mutters whenever it’s her turn, but he has to let her deal. He grabs Mama’s hands, looks over the cards and then plays for her. He thinks everyone is trying to steal his cards and everyone is trying to cheat him, so if he has to go to the bathroom or if he gets called away to the phone—if he has to leave the room for any reason at all—he scoops up all the cards, puts them in his pocket, and takes them with him. The others just sit there, waiting for him to return. If he doesn’t come back, the cards don’t either. Whenever the game room is short of cards, the nurses go raid his bottom drawer (he says the nurses steal from him). The grabbier Ralphie gets, the more Minnie babbles, the quieter Jacob gets, and the more my mother gets confused. She wasn’t too good at cards before the bullet and now all she ever says, when any of them talk to her, is, “What’s trump? What’s trump, Robert?”

  Once she put down a card without waiting for Ralphie to do it and it wasn’t the right suit and he called her a brain-dead moron. I threw my coke in his lap and told him if he ever called her a name like that again I would sneak into his room when he was asleep, cut his snarbles off, and stuff them down his throat. He’s been pretty cautious around me ever since and if he calls her names it’s not where I can hear. Now whenever I come to visit I insist on playing Mama’s cards and dealing for her myself. I love to watch Ralphie get redder and hotter and jerkier. If I want to end the card game and just sit quietly with Mama, I deliberately drop the deck on the floor and then he’s in a huge panic because one of us might pick up a card and keep it. He has to gather them up all by himself and count them over and over and over to make sure he has all fifty-two. Once I slipped in an extra card, for a joke, and he kept getting fifty-three no matter how many times he counted. I thought he was going to have a stroke. I didn’t do that again, it was kind of mean, although I admit I’ve been awfully tempted.

  On Mama’s good days, when she can respond to your questions, she’s trapped somewhere in the past, when she was young, before there was me. If you don’t talk to her, she can’t say anything at all. She doesn’t move much, either, unless you get her started. If you take her arm and start walking she’ll walk with you. By herself, she sits all day and doesn’t move a muscle, except for her fluttering hands, which don’t seem to belong to her at all.

  I used to obsess about her last few minutes. What did she see? What did she think? Did she know? Did she see him coming, see the raised gun? Was terror her last state of mind before grey limbo? I’ve run the scene over and over in my head. I have him come up behind her, so she knows nothing, so she is walking down the hall, thinking about folding laundry, or weeding the petunias, or making pork roast for Sunday dinner, and then there is nothing. My version has to be what happened.

  Nothing, is where she is.

  Nowhere, is where she is.

  I believe, someday, somehow, brain cells will grow, or a new drug will resurrect her lost memory, or a clever surgical twist of a knife will switch on a light and her mind will click back into focus.

  She’ll open her eyes, a little perplexed by her medical surroundings, but only peripherally distracted. She’ll open her eyes wide and she’ll see me, she’ll see her Gwen. She’ll give her head a little shake.

  “Gwennie,” she’ll say, reaching for me with steady hands, “when was the last time you combed your hair?”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 18

  All my mail this week, except for record club offers and threats, comes from the residents, past and present, of the San. Whiny Mrs. Charmichael sent me a huge photograph of herself holding her new grandson at his christening. She’s crocheted an elaborate gown and stuffed him into it. It’s hard to tell what he looks like, there’s sort of a little blob that might be his face buried under a heap of lace. He’s probably passed out with the weight of it. Mrs. Charmichael, a bolster of lime green brocade with a tea tray of fuchsia blossoms on her head, is the proverbial cat with the proverbial canary. If she hadn’t got sick and ended up in the San, Perfect Leander would never have had the time or the nerve to mess around with a girl and there would be no perfect grandbaby for her to rhapsodize about (with the photograph came a seven-page letter detailing the infant’s virtues; evidently it’s the Second Coming).

  OFN scribbled me a note to say Sister Clare is now so depressed they are talking of moving her to a home for the genteelly disturbed. Cranky old Mrs. Cyr is dead, choked on a pickle. Joe Paul, who got out for good a month ago, came back to visit in a brand new pick-up. He’s got new teeth, lost them at his coming-home party but found them again the next day. OFN says he looks just grand.

  Mary wrote to say she’s completely redecorated her bed-room and has enrolled in a secretarial course, but has yet to meet a man suitable for framing. She sounds all right.

  I suppose I am too. This is not exactly the Left Bank or a beach in Majorca, but it is an experience and all experiences are of value to a writer. That’s what I tell myself.

  I still hold out some hope that I can plug the hole in my lung before they cart me off to the butcher shop at the Royal Alex. To this end, I am being wonderfully good. No late nights, lots of good healthy food. I sleep with the window open, even in the driving rain and blowing wind, although there hasn’t been much of that lately. A good snowfall, sprinkled on a great heap of blankets, with me in the middle like a sausage folded in pastry, would be good for my health, according to the old texts from the days of the sanatoriums at Lake Sarnac. But it’s summer, so I’m shit out of luck.

  I’ve been continuing my research into tuberculosis cures through the ages in hopes of finding some long-forgotten nugget of medical wisdom, but it’s hard going, I tell you. I’ve just recently read that in the last century they encouraged tubercular young ladies to get married or even go so far as to have illicit love affairs because sex was supposed to be beneficial. It could save your life, they thought. They assumed the men wouldn’t need any encouragement to screw for the good of their lungs, I guess, because there’s no mention of any necessity to prod them along (take two harlots and call me in the morning?). This century they’ve changed their minds and sex-as-a-cure has gone out of fashion—hence the saltpetre and prim rules about open doors.

  CURES AND THERAPIES, 1750–1950

  1.Joseph Priestly (1733–1804, discoverer of oxygen) attributed the cure of his daughter-in-law to the fumes of a cow barn. It is uncertain what the recommended number of inhalations per minute were, and how long it took to effect a cure. Priestly does not specify dairy barn, but one can assume.

  2. Drink the blood of slaughtered animals.

  3. From the neighbourhood pharmacy: Piso’s Cure For Consumption; Schenck’s Pulmonic Syrup; Hembold’s Buchu Extract; Radam’s Extract.

  These brightly coloured jewels-in-a-bottle contained herbs to stimulate the lungs, and a handsome shot of narcotics and/or alcohol to make the patient feel better and to promote a healing sleep.

 
; 4. Hydrogen sulfide gas and medicated oxygen as inhalation therapy while the patient sat in a glass cabinet. The inexpensive version (see Anna Karenina) was to breathe noxious chemicals from a bottle with a paper cover with pin holes in it. The peasants, one supposes, smashed rotten eggs under their nostrils.

  CHAPTER 19

  Edith is definitely getting worse. She’s troubled more easily, more often. Some days she’s quiet for hours at a time, but when she’s not she comes after me, plucking at my arm, her face all crumpled up and scared.

  “He won’t stop crying,” she says. “Please help me. I can’t make him stop crying.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I make her tea and soothe and distract her. An hour later she’s pulling at my clothes again. “Robert’s crying. I can’t make him stop crying and Papa is so angry.”

  That’s when I call for help and Elizabeth comes over. Sometimes she stays all night. George says it’s near time to put Edith into a home, but I won’t talk about it, I just leave the room. I think it will kill her. She won’t stay next door with them, either. When they tried it she got up in the night and wandered around the fields until she found her way back here. I know they’re just waiting until I go to the Royal Alex before they cart her off. They know I know. I want to scream at these people, tell them they can’t, they can’t, they can’t. But they look so upset all the time—so I can’t. I hate the way the world is. I hate the way things change and get old and fall apart and leave you.

  Elizabeth has got Edith to take a pill, and Edith is snoring in the downstairs bedroom. Elizabeth and I are having a cup of tea and some shortbread and not talking about Edith. Elizabeth’s making a little blue sweater.

  “Donna’s having a baby this fall,” she says, knitting little eyelets into the border for ribbon to run through. Donna is my second cousin, or first, once removed. Something like that. She lives a mile down the road in a trailer in her in-laws’ backyard.

  “She’s having a baby already?” I know for a fact she got married in June.

  “Well, you know, first babies come anytime. The rest take nine months.”

  Country attitudes, I think, are so sensible, so civilized. So unlike my mother and her friend Mae, over tea, scandalized because Cathy—two streets over and barely eighteen—had had a huge wedding, wearing a long white gown with a sheaf of wheat and daisies resting unabashedly on her ballooning belly. They thought Cathy should have got married in a dark hole somewhere, dressed in a navy blue suit, with a dour judge to preside, and a small corsage of ditch weeds pinned to her lapel. What bullshit, I’d thought.

  “Teach me how to knit,” I say. “So I can make something for the baby too.”

  By the end of the week, I’ve managed one bootie—such a bitty thing, and such a struggle. Personally I think it would make more sense to grease their little feet with baby oil, dip them in a box of unspun wool, and shake the excess off. Same effect and much easier. I’ve had to rip the miserable thing out three times. Knitting is far more difficult than I’d realized. Anyone can learn the stitches—but try and make them all the same size without developing a migraine and crippling your fingers. I’ve packed the instructions and the needles and yarn into my suitcase to go to the Alex. I’ll finish the other bootie if it kills me. I want to welcome Donna’s baby into the world. If it’s a girl, I’ll be the cousin it can stay with when it comes to the city, New York or Montreal. Elizabeth has completed an entire layette in the time it’s taken me to do one bootie and has moved on to an afghan. It’s for me, something colourful to put on my hospital bed when I have to go to the Alex.

  In The Magic Mountain, which I flip though when I’m trying to make myself fall asleep in the afternoons, and in the old instruction books from the Adirondack Mountains I’ve liberated from the San library, there are pages and pages devoted to explaining the correct way to fold oneself into one’s blankets.

  For starters, you have to have a sleeping porch, or veranda, with a view of the mountains—or something equally uplifting. Next, you have to have the right sort of lounging chair. According to one book the Adirondack Chair originated from the design of these loungers. Then you’ve got to have the right sort of wool blankets, of a particular number, and a particular weight, and you have to have a carefully trained attendant to properly wrap you. God forbid if he/she laps the left side over the right instead of the right over the left, or folds the ends up over your feet before the sides are properly tucked under. Incorrect wrapping could compromise the whole cure. You’ve got to have the right sort of hat, and the right sort of muffler, and earmuffs, and fleece-lined gloves with silk liners, and—if you’re in the Alps—some sort of fur-of-a-beast to nail down the whole wad o’ wool. In the Adirondacks they seemed to have preferred a topping of waterproof, oiled canvas. Obviously you pee before you settle down because, once wrapped, you’re there for the duration.

  You lie there and haul in great lungfuls of fresh air, try to nap, or think calming thoughts if you can’t nap, and try not to cough blood on the fur. If it snows, you breath in as much of that as you can, too. Lie passively and let the snow pile in great drifts on top of you—the trick is to freeze the germs without freezing yourself.

  After a couple of hours, the attendant comes back and shovels you out, peels you like an artichoke, puts you back to bed indoors, and gives you something nourishing—asses’ milk, wolf liver, or the like.

  If you can’t get to the mountains you’re supposed to head for a desert. Lie out on the desert at night when it gets frosty, properly wrapped and bundled of course, and breathe in that crisp air while marvelling over the starry skies. At one time they set up whole tent cities in places like Arizona and New Mexico just for tubercular Easterners. Acres of cocooned invalids. Can’t you just imagine all that hacking and coughing drifting out over the desert for a hundred miles in any direction? Enough to put the coyotes off their feed.

  Although they’re awfully fussy about the size and weight and position of the blankets, they don’t seem to give a fig about the colour of them. This seems to me to be the most important thing of all. The blankets at the San are grey with dark grey bands or white with light grey bands. Deadly. Elizabeth is making mine sunshine yellow, pumpkin orange, and July-sky blue, at my request. After careful research, deep within my psyche, I have determined that these are the cheeriest colours in the world and the most conducive to plugging up lung holes.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’ve been digging around in Edith’s drawers, looking for information. This would be reprehensible behaviour except for a couple of facts—well, only one, actually. The facts that I’m bored and curious and Edith’s usually too drugged to care what I do are not legitimate excuses for terminal nosiness and the invasion of her privacy.

  The fact that Robert was Edith’s child and not her baby brother and I have just found out is the reason it’s all right for me to poke around in Edith’s—my grandmother’s—stuff. She can’t tell me anything, and this is my family history, so I have to dig up what I can by myself. Elizabeth told me some of it, over the knitting, two days ago. I can’t believe I never guessed, it’s so obvious. I can’t believe I’ve been that dense.

  I sat there with my mouth open, dropping stitches all over the place. Something about sitting in the parlour over tea and pointy needles makes Elizabeth get all confidential. The day before she’d told me all about the hysterectomy she’d had when she was thirty-five, despite my frantic objections to specific detail.

  Maybe it’s because I’m the only female in my direct line who’s still got all her marbles in one basket. I’m the only one left to talk to. Or maybe she just thinks I’m old enough to know this stuff and there’s nobody else left in the family to tell me. Mama and Edith, even working as a team, couldn’t string together a coherent sentence.

  “How? Where?” I sputtered.

  “She went to Halifax,” said Elizabeth, “and worked as a maid for a Christian Society that looked after girls in
trouble. Her parents told everyone she was taking training to be a phone receptionist. Susanna, her mother, pretended to be pregnant, and then pretended to have the baby prematurely on a visit to see Edith on her birthday. Your grandfather, Edith’s father, stayed home and pretended none of it was happening. He was hard on Robert, growing up. Real hard.”

  “What did she do afterwards? Edith, I mean.”

  “She stayed there a couple of years, working. She trained to be a nursing assistant, and then when Susanna got real sick Edith came home to nurse her and to look after Robert. Susanna was always an invalid after that. We were always told it was because she’d had Robert so late, and it was too much for her. Almost nobody knew Robert wasn’t hers to begin with. I wouldn’t have known if Edith hadn’t told me at her father’s funeral. He was hard on her, too. As soon as he died she took out that picture of her fiancé, put it on the piano, and started wearing her engagement ring again.”

  I’m having to reassess that silver-framed, weak-chinned, pasty-faced, long-nosed, cowardly little snot who ran off to Rome and left Edith unmarried and pregnant. His poetry probably stank, that’s why nobody ever heard of him again. I can’t find anything from him, not a note, not a pressed posy, not a picture, other than the one on the piano. That picture and the ring are the only things she has. She’s still wearing the ring, she never takes it off. They won’t let her wear it in the home, in case somebody steals it. Instead, they’ll steal it from her and give it to me.

  There are lots of pictures in bottom drawers of Robert. Some I’ve never seen before, him in Newfoundland as a young man, flying kites on the hill where Marconi set up to receive his first transcontinental messages. He told me once that Marconi used a kite to get his aerial up. In the picture he looks about twenty. He’s grinning like a fool, in rolled-up shirt sleeves and heavy wool pants and suspenders, hanging onto kite strings. Whenever I look at that picture I hate the way the world is again. And him. I want a Hembold’s Buchu Extract or six on ice with a twist of lime so I can feel better and pass out. I want hell to be a stinking cow barn and him upside down in it with his head buried in cowshit.